Literary critic, author and 'great humanist' Ian Watt dies

Internationally acclaimed literary
critic and author Ian Watt died on Monday, Dec. 13, after a long
illness. At the time of his death he had been at the Menlo Park
Place nursing home for a year.

Professor emeritus of English at
Stanford, Watt was the author of numerous articles and several
books on literary theory, most notably The Rise of the Novel
and Conrad in the Nineteenth Century.

Born March 9, 1917, in Windermere in
England, Watt was educated at the Dover County School for Boys and
at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he earned first-class
honors in English.

Watt joined the British Army at the
age of 22 and served with distinction in World War II as an army
lieutenant in the infantry from 1939 to 1946. He was wounded in the
battle for Singapore in January 1942 and listed as "missing,
presumed killed in action." In fact, he was taken prisoner by the
Japanese and remained a prisoner of war until 1945, working on the
construction of a railway that crossed Thailand ­ a feat that
inspired the Pierre Boulle novel Bridge Over the River Kwai
and the film version by David Lean.

More than 12,000 prisoners died
during the building of the railroad, most of them from disease, and
Watt was critically ill from malnutrition for several
years.

"There was a period when I expected
to die," Watt told the San Francisco Examiner in a 1979
interview. "But I didn't know how sick I was until they gave me
some of the vitamin pills that had just come into the camp. I
remember being very surprised that I was considered sick enough to
receive vitamins."

During his illness, Watt read all of
Shakespeare's plays and the works of Dante and Swift.

When he returned home, Watt found
that his family and friends were uncomfortable talking about the
war years and his absence.

"It was the same when I met my old
teachers and my old school friends," he would write years later.
"They hadn't really changed, but I had, and they didn't know it,
but I did. They wanted to hear about my time as a prisoner of war,
of course, but not in enough detail to understand it, and so I got
off the conversational hook with a few funny stories."

Watt returned to Cambridge after the
war for graduate work, earning his doctorate in 1947, and went on
to study at the University of California-Los Angeles and Harvard
University. In 1952 he became an assistant professor of English at
the University of California-Berkeley, where he taught for 10
years. He also taught at the University of British Columbia and at
the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, where he was the
first dean of the new School of English Studies.

Watt came to Stanford in 1964. He
was chair of the English department from 1968 to 1971, when he was
named the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of English. He also
chaired the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. Watt held
several research fellowships, including Guggenheim Fellowships in
1959 and 1972.

"Ian was a towering intellectual
presence in the English department and one of the great humanists
at Stanford," said Albert Gelpi, professor of English. "I also knew
him as a colleague and as a kind of avuncular and very dear friend
to me as a somewhat younger faculty member."

Gelpi added that Watt guided the
English department through the turbulent days of the late 1960s and
early '70s with "great humor, dignity, grace and
leadership."

"He gave leadership to the
department when the campus was filled with protest marches and
student resistance and anti-war feeling," Gelpi said. "I will
always remember that when there was a department meeting to discuss
a department response to the invasion of Cambodia, Ian proposed
that the whole department go on strike and participate in the
general movement on campus against American policy. And we did go
on strike."

Barbara Gelpi, professor of English,
recalls the welcome Watt provided when she came to Stanford in
1969.

"I found Ian awe-inspiring not
because he was full of his own dignity, but simply because he was
so learned," Barbara Gelpi said. "He was chair of the department
and as a young person off the tenure track, I found him to be a
very good friend. Although he didn't seem like a feminist, he
actually made the English department a very congenial place for me
and other women to work."

In 1957 Watt published The Rise
of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, which
explored the connections between social change in 18th-century
England and the emergence of the novel as a distinct genre. It
quickly became a classic for students of that literary
form.

"The Rise of the Novel was
not reviewed at first in a way that would suggest it would become a
classic, although Irving Howe gave it high praise when it came
out," said Bliss Carnochan, professor emeritus of English and
former director of the Stanford Humanities Center.

"The effect of the book was more
cumulative, over time, than it was immediate. It helped shift the
attention of literary criticism from the older, so-called New
Critical style, which emphasized poetry, to a new habit of
sociological and cultural criticism, which was more likely to
emphasize the novel, and which survives to the present."

Watt's book Conrad in the
Nineteenth Century was published in 1979 and hailed as another
landmark in literary scholarship. He also was the author of
Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan,
Robinson Crusoe.

In 1972 Watt was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Two years later he delivered
the Alexander Lectures at University College, University of
Toronto, taking as his subject "Four Western Myths." In 1980 he
gave the Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism at Princeton
University.

In 1980 Watt was named founding
director of the Stanford Humanities Center, a position that he held
until 1985.

The spring 2000 volume of the
Stanford Humanities Review, which is headquartered at the
Humanities Center, will commemorate Watt's work with a special
issue titled "Critical History: The Career of Ian Watt."
Eighteenth Century Fiction, a journal based at McMaster
University in Ontario, also is publishing a special issue about
Watt's work, "Reconsidering The Rise of the
Novel."

Watt's papers are collected in the
Stanford archives, and Carnochan said they offer unique insight on
his work.

"Ian was enormously careful,"
Carnochan said. "He revised and revised and wouldn't let anything
into print until he had worked it over many times and was more or
less satisfied with it. To read over a page of his manuscripts is
to see visibly and graphically the astonishing extent of his
revisions."

Watt is survived by his wife, Ruth
Mellinkoff Watt of Stanford; son George Watt of Bangkok; daughter
Josephine Reed of Salt Lake City; and granddaughters Alison and
Joanna.

No services are planned, at Watt's
request. Friends may make donations to the charities of their
choice. SR